One of the things I would like to leave this conference with is some ideas about how we can collaborate between Chesapeake Bay and Australia. Let’s figure out how we can collaborate and work together. I’ll give you an example that I’ve thought up with some other folks at the University of Queensland. We can look at event-driven responses. We had a big flood in 2003 in the Chesapeake, and of course, Moreton Bay had the 2011 flood.

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This is where Governor O’Malley came in and he created BayStat. This was based on tracking nutrient and sediment reductions. Our eutrophication problem is over-enrichment of nutrients creating dissolved oxygen “dead zones”. Innovations in governance: BayStat … O'Malley puts together an interesting assortment of people.

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The last thing I want to talk about is innovations in governance. This is a story I want to start in New York City, where there was a guy called Jack Maple. He always had a bow-tie and a bowler. He was a transit cop, policing the subways and buses in New York. He started putting pins on maps, to plot where crime was. He then started being seen as some guru, because he predicted Friday at 4 o clock, there was going to be a mugging at the Broadway Street subway station.

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Report cards are also a great way to bring together disparate groups. An extreme example is that the US State Department was trying to mediate some dialog between Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan when Armenia and Azerbaijan were technically still at war. So we got together with them, and we put up this first map of six indicators. They had never seen this map or this data before.

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I want to talk about innovations in environmental reporting. One of the things we stumbled upon in Southeast Queensland is environmental report cards, and I got to thinking why they are so powerful. I have two teenage children, who you can definitely see are driven by peer pressure in their everyday life. Peer pressure is a really powerful motivator.

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Another thing that we did was create IAN Press. We’ve created a self publishing kind of approach and what’s cool about it is that this can be full color, 230 pages, and we can sell it for $20 US, and not lose money. We finally have the technology of tablet computers. The tablet version really works because you can scale up images and get a really good look at them. I think that the electronic tablet era is going to be really handy for these kinds of publications.

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I distinguish science communication from science writing. If you think about a science paper, you provide lots of references, which is the scientific context for that study. Science communication provides societal examples, because it's all about context, to make the message translate to a broader audience. In scientific literature, there is usually just text, while in science communication, we try to balance with graphics and use color.

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In the middle of the National Environmental Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) seagrass project, we created the Annapolis Synthesis Center. The UMCES Annapolis Office … Annapolis is much like Santa Barbara, it's a cute town that you can walk around in, fly in without getting in a car, and it's the capital of Maryland as well as home to the U.S. Naval Academy.

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At the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, we formed a seagrass working group, recruiting colleagues to help populate a global database of seagrass trajectories. We focused on what we could document in terms of seagrass area, density, biomass and cover. Seagrass working group at NCEAS … And then we used that database, interrogated it and wrote scientific papers. The first thing we saw, as expected, was that seagrass is being lost, globally.

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The synthesis I want to talk about is that synthesis that leads to environmental outcomes, so this isn't just writing books and papers for colleagues, it is taking that next step to generate environmental outcomes in terms of policy, in terms of planning, in terms of implementation and in terms of directing our resources towards making maximum benefit of our available environmental dollars.

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